Serving Women in Ghana (SWG)

Vision

An environment in which Women’s health care is readily available to all women, allowing them and their offspring to live full lives in optimal health, and fertility will be seen as a gift, used thoughtfully and responsibly to allow women to reach their maximum life’s potential, for the benefit of the entire community.

Purpose

Woman With GoiterSWG was formed as a response to many stories of avoidable tragic outcomes around women’s health and childbearing, and is an effort to create a model health care facility for women, with high quality, affordable care, offered in a clean environment, with dignity afforded to all who are served. A key part of this project would be to provide care to a proportion of women who could otherwise not afford such care, and to offer support to local midwives as they are the ones who perform the majority of obstetric deliveries in developing countries. This support would include serving as an initial referral point in the management of complicated cases, as well as providing periodic continuing medical education (CME) in obstetric management and neonatal resuscitation.  In the past, Dr. Laing has taught management of obstetric emergencies to physicians and midwives, as part of the faculty of Africa Partners  Medical which has held yearly multidisciplinary CME courses in Kumasi, Ghana. This could significantly impact outcomes, as delayed or inadequate management of emergencies is often a big factor in the poor outcomes referred to above.

Preventive health care is often low on the list of priorities of overburdened governments, and efforts to screen for Cervical and Breast cancer, both of which affect women in their prime and limit their lifespan, are another key arm of this project. Alternative approaches to the technology intensive or high cost methods used in developed countries could be offered with large benefits over an absence of options altogether. Such options would include cervical screening with visual inspection with acetic acid (VIA), and clinical breast examinations.  Local training of assistants, midwives, public health nurses by the physician could extend care to much larger numbers, than could be seen directly by individual highly trained personnel, for such breast or cervical cancer screening.

Contact

Serving Women in Ghana
P O Box 127
Wooster, OH  44691, USA

OR

Obaatan Pa Women’s Hospital
P O Box CT 9389
Accra, Ghana